among which I had gathered wilks (whelks) seemed to have vanished, and a tame flat shoal remained.  The schoolhouse, around which had centered many of my schoolboy recollections—­my only Alma Mater—­and the playground, upon which mimic battles had been fought and races run, had shrunk into ridiculously small dimensions.  The fine residences, Broomhall, Fordell, and especially the conservatories at Donibristle, fell one after the other into the petty and insignificant.  What I felt on a later occasion on a visit to Japan, with its small toy houses, was something like a repetition of the impression my old home made upon me.

Everything was there in miniature.  Even the old well at the head of Moodie Street, where I began my early struggles, was changed from what I had pictured it.  But one object remained all that I had dreamed of it.  There was no disappointment in the glorious old Abbey and its Glen.  It was big enough and grand enough, and the memorable carved letters on the top of the tower—­“King Robert The Bruce”—­filled my eye and my heart as fully as of old.  Nor was the Abbey bell disappointing, when I heard it for the first time after my return.  For this I was grateful.  It gave me a rallying point, and around the old Abbey, with its Palace ruins and the Glen, other objects adjusted themselves in their true proportions after a time.

My relatives were exceedingly kind, and the oldest of all, my dear old Auntie Charlotte, in a moment of exultation exclaimed: 

“Oh, you will just be coming back here some day and keep a shop in the High Street.”

To keep a shop in the High Street was her idea of triumph.  Her son-in-law and daughter, both my full cousins, though unrelated to each other, had risen to this sublime height, and nothing was too great to predict for her promising nephew.  There is an aristocracy even in shopkeeping, and the family of the green grocer of the High Street mingles not upon equal terms with him of Moodie Street.

Auntie, who had often played my nurse, liked to dwell upon the fact that I was a screaming infant that had to be fed with two spoons, as I yelled whenever one left my mouth.  Captain Jones, our superintendent of the steel works at a later day, described me as having been born “with two rows of teeth and holes punched for more,” so insatiable was my appetite for new works and increased production.  As I was the first child in our immediate family circle, there were plenty of now venerable relatives begging to be allowed to play nurse, my aunties among them.  Many of my childhood pranks and words they told me in their old age.  One of them that the aunties remembered struck me as rather precocious.

I had been brought up upon wise saws and one that my father had taught me was soon given direct application.  As a boy, returning from the seashore three miles distant, he had to carry me part of the way upon his back.  Going up a steep hill in the gloaming he remarked upon the heavy load, hoping probably I would propose to walk a bit.  The response, however, which he received was: